30 Years Later: Why Fatal Attraction Never Sat Right with Glenn Close

In Fatal Attraction,Glenn Close kicks up a tempest. She plays Alex Forrest, an Other Woman whose affection sours into something more obsessive, a swirling mass of emotion that gets violent when she doesn’t get her way. She seethes; she screams; she boils bunnies. And it’s all because her racy affair with her colleague, Dan Gallagher (a smooth Michael Douglas), doesn’t turn into something more permanent—on account of his marriage, and on account of him wanting to have his cake and eat it too.

But he didn’t bank on Alex’s darker side. Her obsession with him triggers something deeper, a brewing mental illness (though the film isn’t tactful enough to treat it that way). She stalks him, kidnaps his child, and attacks his wife, a horrible denouement that ends with Dan nearly drowning Alex. In the end, it is the wife who violently deals the final, fatal blow.

Fatal Attraction, which turns 30 on Sept. 18, has built a complex legacy since its release. It was a box-office success that earned six Oscar nominations, including a nod for Close. It also sparked a pool of pale imitators, which are being released even to this day. Yet Close herself has led the charge of those who disparage the movie and her character—whose mental illness went unchecked and unnamed, marooning her in deeply misunderstood territory. In real life, Close is an advocate for mental health awareness; she has candidly discussed living with depression and co-founded a nonprofit, Bring Change to Mind, that aims to break the stigma surrounding mental illness. But more than anyone else, she’s still perturbed by the particular legacy of Attraction and the way Alex was painted. And in nearly every interview she has done about the movie since its release, Close has made it abundantly clear that Attraction, for all its violent delights, did not do right by its main character. In a way, it’s become her mission to give Alex the justice she deserves.

Just as recently as this September, Close discussed the amount of research she did before the film, noting that Alex had a depth that was ultimately overlooked in favor of shock value. “There’s no way for the audience to know what her past was,” she told The Guardian. “It’s only hinted at when she looks at him giving the bunny to his daughter and then throws up in the bushes. Nobody would say: well why did that happen? Whereas I asked that and the psychiatrist said if she was molested at an early age, and what she was made to do made her gag and throw up, then that’s her trigger.”

Close echoed this sentiment in a 2016 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I felt from all my research, I just didn’t think she was a psychopath,” she said. “I thought she was a deeply disturbed woman.”

But the film’s ending transformed Alex into a full-fledged supervillain, a decision Close despised. Attraction was originally supposed to end with Alex killing herself and framing Dan for murder, after ensuring that his wife would find out about everything. However, test audiences didn’t care for that resolution.

“They want[ed] us to terminate the bitch with extreme prejudice,” former Paramount exec Ned Tanen told The Hollywood Reporter. Close fought bitterly against the new ending, reportedly saying, “You can take me in a straitjacket, but you can’t make me do it.” In an interview with The New York Times, she said she fought the studio for two weeks: “It was going to make a character I loved into a murdering psychopath.”

Close eventually caved, filming the ending that cemented the movie’s status as a shocker for the ages. In the E.W. interview, she accepted that there were two sides to the decision—acknowledging that she “was right to feel the way I felt,” but the studio was also “right to change the ending for the sake of what it did for the movie.”

However, if a modern-day Close were to be handed this script today, it would come across much differently, she told CBS in 2013, after saying again that the film “played into the stigma” of mental illness. It also created the bunny-boiler archetype, a sexist trope that hasn’t abated.

“The astounding thing was that in my research for Fatal Attraction I talked to two psychiatrists,” she said then. “Never did a mental disorder come up. Never did the possibility of that come up. That, of course, would be the first thing I would think of now.”

Were Fatal Attraction to be released today, it would likely be dragged by the conscientious masses—shredded for exploiting mental illness without even naming it as such. What was clear to Close all those years ago—that Alex was a troubled woman in desperate need of help—would be immediately obvious to modern viewers.

“Now she’s considered one of the greatest villains ever,” she told the Times. “That to me is a mistake. I’ve never thought of her as a villain, just in distress.”